Biblical (20 page)

He had shown her his Mark. She had seen it. Touched it … Bundy completed his night-time ritual, brushing and flossing his teeth. He had just climbed into bed when the door opened. President Yates stood silhouetted in the doorframe, carrying a document in one hand.

“Ethan,” she said with quiet command, “I’m afraid we’re going to have to do something about Professor Hoberman.”

Something unknown is doing we don’t know what.

Professor Sir Arthur Eddington, astrophysicist

The bullying stopped before it had really started, but then the looks, the suspicions, the whispers, had begun.

His jaw broken, three teeth dislodged, a rib cracked and suffering from severe concussion, Maartens had been off school for two weeks, the first three days of which had been spent in hospital in Leeuwarden, and when he returned his face had still been badly discolored and distended, his jaw wired shut.

From scrabbled-together scraps of rumor, Fabian worked out that Maartens must have staggered his way back to the edge of town before fainting in the street. An ambulance and the police had been called. Violence was rare in a small coastal community such as this and they could see from Maartens’s injuries that they were dealing with multiple assailants. Assuming the assault had taken place where Henkje had been found, they wanted answers but he’d been in no condition to provide them until a good twenty-four hours later. It was then that the police had pressured him for the identity or description of his assailants.

So he gave them exactly that. Henkje described three older boys, about seventeen or eighteen, none of whom he recognized; in such a small community, that meant they must have been outsiders. When Henkje told the police that one of the boys had asked him for money, he had thrown in that his attacker spoke with some kind of foreign accent. When he had told the foreigners that he had no money on him, they had
launched into an attack against which he was defenseless, beating him to the ground and kicking him. The attack, he explained, had taken place a few hundred meters from where he had been found.

The police had accepted the story, as had the wider community, eager to believe that such brutality had to have come from outside their small world. Henkje’s embellishment of foreign accents had set older heads nodding with sad sagacity: such things were to be expected these days.

While Henkje had been off school, his entourage of lesser bullies had left Fabian alone. Fabian was pretty sure that they knew nothing of what had really happened: they simply lacked the focus Henkje had provided and were too busy dealing with the indignity of their leader’s humiliating beating.

The sight of the returning Henkje, his puffed-up face a rainbow of greens, purples and blues, his jaw wired shut, did even more to chasten their strutting. It was on the second day of Henkje’s return that Fabian encountered him in the school corridor, between classes and without his friends. Their eyes met and Henkje’s fell immediately to the floor; in that moment Fabian knew his troubles were over as far as Maartens and his cronies were concerned. But there was no sense of triumph: whenever Fabian saw Henkje, which was seldom, as the bigger boy clearly made an effort to stay out of his way, he was filled with an urge to apologize, to somehow make amends, to explain about the déjà vu experience on the beach. But none of it made sense.

Henkje’s jaw remained wired for a month. But even after the swelling and discoloration had disappeared from his face, he was a changed boy. And it was just about the time that his jaw had been unwired that Fabian also noticed a change in the others. First Henkje’s friends, then others in the school began to avoid Fabian. Avert their eyes. Even Robin Hoekstra, who was the closest thing he had to a friend and sat next to him in
History, seemed to be avoiding him. Fabian considered confronting Henkje, but he let it go. In many ways, it suited him that his peers kept their distance; he had always felt that he didn’t belong with them, that he was adrift in time, geography and society.

Three months on from the attack, but completely unconnected to it, the Maartens family moved out of the area and inland, to Bakkefean. Fabian no longer had to face his guilt in the school hallways. But the others. The others remained distant, almost fearful of him. He even began to catch the odd strange look from a teacher.

Life went on. Fabian still returned to the beach each week, seeking comfort in the spot he had always gone to, but it was somehow less special now, as if the sand he sat in was still soiled with Henkje’s blood.

He sat again on the beach by the rock, the vast sky pressing flat land and sea. Everything was the same as the day he had encountered Henkje and everything was different. The sky was still as big, but today vast billows of gray-white clouds, like the sails of ghostly ships, slid across its shield and the temperature was several degrees cooler.

Once more, Fabian thought back to the fury that had been unleashed. He had become an animal, a thing of base instinct and mindless violence. What troubled him most was that he had enjoyed it, a thirst being slaked. He had never, in his fourteen years, felt more vital, more alive. His world had never felt more real.

He sat with his back to the stone, poking at the sand with a salt- and sun-bleached stick, his thoughts wandering.

It came upon him suddenly and completely: the same feeling. Like déjà vu but not déjà vu. More intense. He sat bolt upright, casting his gaze around him. Everything was the same: the sky, the temperature, the light. Nothing had changed, yet he felt his heart beat faster in his chest, his pulse rushing in his ears.
It terrified him that this could be the prelude to another act of uncontrollable violence, or another episode where time repeated itself.

He scanned the sea’s horizon, swept his gaze back to the promontory and to the dunes and the dyke behind him. Everything was the same, unchanged. But something
was
different. It was just that he couldn’t see it. Yet. He scanned the horizon again, turning in a slow three-sixty-degree circle: concentrating, narrowing his eyes, seeking out each detail.

The promontory. Something was wrong with the finger of grass and sand that insubstantially prodded the North Sea. His vague panic suddenly became specific, concentrated. The lighthouse. The lighthouse was gone. Fabian staggered back a few steps. How could the lighthouse, which had stood sentinel on the promontory for one hundred and fifty years, suddenly disappear? He closed his eyes tight, but when he opened them again, it was still gone.

Like a sudden surge of nausea, the odd feeling rapidly intensified, reaching deep, deep inside him. This was beyond déjà vu, beyond a feeling of inexplicable resonances: this was a seismic shift in his sense of place and time, the universe around him, within him, reconfiguring itself. He began to shake. Another wave, even stronger.

The ship-sail clouds had disappeared, the sky now clear. The chill in the afternoon air was gone. Fabian knew he was not somewhere else – this was still exactly the same space he had occupied a second ago – this was
sometime
else.

Voices. Distant. Behind him.

He spun around and looked back towards the land. Like the lighthouse on the promontory, the gentle green swelling of the dyke had disappeared. There was now no clear demarcation between beach and land, instead the sand smudged into a mudbrown band, in turn smudging into an ugly tangle of scurvy-grass, sedge and plantain. How had he come to know
what these marsh grasses were? Why was this alien landscape not alien to him? Fabian was snapped out of his thoughts by the sounds of voices again. Many voices. He could not see who was talking but reckoned that they were somewhere beyond the band of marsh grass. To his surprise, he realized he was no longer afraid – not in the slightest bit afraid – but he instinctively felt the need to approach the voices with stealth. He stepped forward, heading inland towards the towering grasses, and felt himself sink up to his knees. Looking down, he saw the soft pale sand had been replaced with dull gray mud. Wadden. He ploughed through the mud, a slow, laborious wading that cost him his sneakers and sucked his sports socks from his feet. Again he was surprised by his lack of surprise: nothing made sense, yet everything was somehow just as he expected it to be.

It took Fabian ten sweating, heaving minutes to traverse the Waddenzee mudflats and reach dryer sand and the fringe of tall grasses. Once he was free of the mud’s clinging embrace, he looked down at his naked feet and his jeans, sodden and caked with mud. Whatever was happening to him, whatever this was, it looked, sounded, felt and smelled real. If he was going mad, he was going completely mad in every sense. He pushed his way through the grasses, staying hidden in them as he reached their landside edge. Easing them apart like curtains, he peered through cautiously.

A village. Or a camp. Or something in between.

There was a dozen or so unevenly spaced wooden lodges clustered around a square of scraped-bare earth. Each lodge was elevated a foot or so from the ground by stout wooden stanchions; timber-framed and beamed, the walls wattle and daub, the roofs composed of densely woven thatch. Unlike the pristine, sharp-edged geometry of Fabian’s brick-built home that proclaimed Man’s independence from Nature, these lodges seemed organic, constructed from natural materials gathered
from their immediate environment – mud and seagrass straw and rough-hewn timber. They seemed still part of the landscape, fused with it.

Smoke curled up into the clear sky from a fire in the raw earth central square. A group of children ran around, playing tag and laughing and squealing as they evaded or submitted to capture. They looked like any group of children, apart from their odd clothes. A woman came out of one of the lodges, climbing down the hewn-log steps, balancing some kind of wood and hide bucket on her hip. She wore a weary maturity around her like a heavy cloak – she was a woman and not a girl – yet Fabian guessed she could only be a year or two older than him. Her hair was red-blonde and gathered up into a knot behind her head. She was pretty, her features regular and well-defined, but Fabian could see even at a distance that her skin was roughened and reddened on the nose and cheeks, as if weather-beaten. He ducked back as she turned in his direction, her face empty of expression. There was no sign that the young woman had seen Fabian hiding in the rushes, but she headed straight for him. He sank back as much as he dared without creating a telltale ripple in the long stalks of seagrass. He could see her clearly now: she wore a yellow tunic, a long mustard-colored skirt with a slightly longer petticoat beneath. Fabian could tell that he was looking at an outfit that did not belong to his time. For a moment he contemplated the insanity of his situation and wondered if he was looking at some kind of re-enactment – maybe they had set up some kind of living museum: a Dark Ages theme park. But that didn’t make sense; it didn’t explain the disappearance of the lighthouse or the dyke, or the Waddenzee mudflats having shifted position.

Maybe, he thought, ghosts do exist. Maybe this was a village of the dead.

The woman was now directly in front of him. She tilted the leather bucket and spilled its contents into the seagrass, almost
tipping them directly onto Fabian. The water she spilled smelled foul and the odor seemed to seize Fabian by the throat, causing him to cough. He knew he had given away his presence and there was nothing for it but to reveal himself fully. His mind raced as he tried to find the words, form the sentences, to explain the inexplicable.

He stood up.

He was now face to face with her, only a meter or so apart. He could see the detailing on the brocade band that held her hair back and on the fringe of her tunic; he could see the flaky redness across her nose and cheeks, he could smell her scent, the odor of her body, not an unclean nor unpleasant smell.

“I’m sorry …” He found some words. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I—”

She looked straight through him, as if he wasn’t there, staring out into the grasses before turning and heading back whence she came. She hadn’t seen him. He had not been there.

This was no phantom village. The woman had been no ghost, Fabian realized.
He
was the ghost.

People, Macbeth knew, liked to scare themselves with spook stories. As a psychiatrist he understood the mechanism: the ghost story reader or horror movie fan thriving on simulations of frightening environments with which to tease and confuse the amygdala, that most ancient and primal of the brain’s structures, into believing there is real and immediate danger; the chemical signals sent from amygdala to hypothalamus in turn releasing epinephrine, norepinephrine and cortisol into the system.

Except, of course, everyone in their heart of hearts knows that a ghost story or a horror movie isn’t real, so the adrenalinebuzz can be enjoyed at one remove and without real fight or flight, the fear becomes mitigated, vicarious and packaged for entertainment.

Macbeth, with his odd detachment from the world as others saw it, often noticed the way catastrophe and suffering were reported on TV: conveyed with professionally synthetic modulation and intonation, as if natural voices were somehow inappropriate. Macbeth wondered if it was, just as with horror movies, a deliberate repackaging of fear to keep it at one remove. There had been rare times, of course, when the professional demeanor had fallen away, the fear had become immediate and the reporters became real people. Oddly enough, those rare occasions had been when reality had turned on its head and looked more like a Hollywood disaster movie, like the unreal reality of planes being flown into New York towers.

The reporting of the events in Boston was becoming like that. The New England media’s handling of the ‘ghostquake’ was mixed and confused. The event made no sense, yet people had died and almost everyone in Eastern Massachusetts had experienced it. Professional gravity yielded to a more fundamental, more genuine anxiety.

Especially when it emerged that Boston had not been alone.